Lincoln and His
Legacy

February 19,
2008

At this point it is probably futile to try to
reverse the deification of Abraham Lincoln. Next year, if I know my
countrymen, the bicentennial of his birth will be marked by stupendously
cloying anniversary observances, all of them affirming, if not his literal
divinity, at least something mighty close to it.

No
doubt we will hear from the high priests and priestesses of the
Lincoln cult: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Garry Wills, Harry V. Jaffa, and all the
rest of the tireless hagiographers of academia, who regularly rate Honest
Abe one of our two greatest presidents, right up there with Stalins
buddy Franklin D. Roosevelt, father of the nuclear age and defiler of the U.S.
Constitution. Such, we are told, is the Verdict of History.

But if
Lincoln was so great, we must ask why nobody seems to have realized it
while he was still alive. The abolitionists considered him unprincipled,
Southerners hated him, and most Northerners opposed his war on the South.
Only when the war ended and he was shot did people begin to transform him
into a hero and martyr of the Union cause. But that cause was badly flawed.

The
Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln always quoted selectively, says
that the American colonies of Great Britain had become free and
independent states  separate states, mind you, not the
monolithic new nation he proclaimed at Gettysburg. The U.S.
Constitution refers constantly to the states, but never to a
nation; and this is a fact we should ponder.

Alas, it
appears that Lincoln seldom thought about it. For him the Union was
somehow prior to its members, except in his younger days, when, oddly
enough, he had been a passionate advocate of the most sacred
right of secession  in other countries. When and why he
changed his mind, or the reason he never applied this principle to his native
country, we do not know; but Gore Vidal, among other keen observers, has
called attention to this most striking inconsistency of his career. What he
called saving the Union simply meant the denial of this most
sacred right, and he was willing to pay any price in blood to achieve it.

No wonder
his favorite play was Macbeth. He may have seen himself in
the tyrant who had waded too far into a river of gore to turn back. Far more
Americans died in his war than in any other in our history.

A few
books have told the dark story of Lincolns suppression of liberty in
the North, including the thousands of arbitrary arrests and hundreds of
closings of newspapers; his war on the South required a war on the Bill of
Rights in the North as well. All in the name of freedom, of course.

Despite his
symbolic importance, most Americans know little about Lincoln. He was very
secretive about himself and his family, and he remains something of an
enigma to his biographers. One fact is clear, though: he was poorly educated.
He made up for this with his rare rhetorical and political genius; his eloquence
continues to create the illusion of greatness.

Maybe it
would have happened anyway, but since Lincoln the Constitution has meant
not what it says, but whatever the U.S. Government decides it shall mean.
The very meaning of constitutionality has become entirely fluid, so that the
law itself has become exactly what law should never be: unpredictable.

Think of
the U.S. Supreme Courts notorious 1973 abortion ruling. Nobody
before then had ever suggested that abortion was a constitutional right, but
the Court suddenly discovered that it was, protected somehow by the Ninth
and Fourteenth Amendments. The laws of all 50 states were struck down at
a blow, but thanks to Lincoln the remedy of secession was no longer available
to them.

Todays United States of America would be constitutionally
unrecognizable to the authors of the original Constitution, because today the
government has become the wolf at the door. Do I exaggerate? A television
commercial asks, Is the IRS ruining your life?

Imagine
what Washington and Jefferson would have said about that question! They
never dreamed that their countrymen would live in dread of the government
created to secure their liberty. But that is what has happened to this
country, and much of this is Abraham Lincolns legacy.

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